1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to information technology (IT) infrastructures and, specifically, to such infrastructures in the e-business environment.
2. Background Art
Business transactions between organizations often involve exchange of documents. Typically, documents have been moving across organizational boundaries by facsimile or by e-mail via networks such as the telephone and Internet. One example involves ordering and invoicing via direct e-mail between business partners. These methods of direct communications between business partners have improved over time in no small part thanks to the proliferation of e-commerce as well as advances in IT infrastructures as facilitators of e-commerce transactions. With such IT infrastructures, systems have been able to communicate and interact directly with each other.
However, in the distributed and diverse IT infrastructure environment of systems, applications and databases, each system creates, stores, and presents documents in its native format. Thus a problem arises of solving incompatibilities between systems and, in turn, between their native document formats.
One approach was adopted where, the documents are sent and received by each system in its native format where along the way transformation or mapping facilities resolve the incompatibility between such systems. This is illustrated in FIG. 1 where the incompatibility between the systems of business partners A and B is resolved by direct mapping from the native format of partner A's system to the native format of partner B's system, and vice versa.
However, the direct mapping imposes a significant maintenance burden because the mapping facilities will have to adapt to changes in the corresponding formats. Direct mapping is maintenance intensive in that the business rules have to be duplicated in each map for each partner. Namely, for an organization that does business with, say, 5 partners, each of which using its individual native document format, there will be 5 maps (each one having the duplicated business rules for the document source partner). And, in data mining, one cannot count on particular data being at a desired place and time. In addition to data mining issues, it is also very difficult to apply a standard set of business logic if the same document is in several different forms based on the requirements of the receiver. Moreover, these approaches do not support scalability, flexibility and timeliness, nor do they provide load balancing. In this environment, flexibility is desired in terms of properly accommodating business-partner-specific rules and policies. And, scalability is desired not only in terms of improved performance and system capacity but also in terms of adding business partners to the system, and in a timely fashion. Accordingly there is a need for a better approach than the foregoing. The present invention addresses these and related issues.